Donald Trump describes his unscripted, meandering speaking style as “the weave.” He has boasted: “I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together.”
But occasionally, the president gets tied up as tightly as Gulliver in all those threads that he has spun.
He confuses his allies and leaves plenty of room for his adversaries to interpret — or misinterpret — as they will.
Democrats by now have learned — and sometimes adopted — Trump’s tactic of creating and amplifying false storylines when it serves their purposes. But rarely has he handed them such an opportunity as with his megaton blooper at a packed rally Monday evening in Grand Island, Nebraska.
In an apparent reference to gas prices, though he hadn’t explicitly mentioned them, Trump said: “It’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay.”
No speechwriter would have crafted those words that way. It takes some attention to context and no small indulgence of syntax to understand Trump was claiming that high energy costs are a temporary necessity to prevent an attack by Iran on major U.S. cities.
But the approving roar of the MAGA crowd suggested that his devoted supporters believed Trump had said he would welcome as a “small price” the annihilation of two heavily Democratic metropolitan areas with a combined population of more than 16 million people.
It didn’t help that Trump has a long record of animosity toward California. He withheld disaster aid to assist in recovery after 2025 wildfires, overstepped legal bounds by deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles during protests over immigration raids and has called the nation’s populous state “a disgrace to our country.”
Leading what became a chorus of denunciations by Democrats, California Gavin Newsom wrote on social media: “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.”
The two cities’ mayors joined in, with Karen Bass of Los Angeles saying Trump’s comments “potentially compromise our safety” and San Diego’s Todd Gloria pronouncing: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable.”
Others, including former vice president Kamala Harris, found opportunities to raise money off Trump’s comments.
But even some Republicans criticized Trump’s comments. Among them was San Diego County Board of Supervisors member Jim Desmond, who has been endorsed by Trump in his bid for an open House seat. “I vehemently disagree with President Trump’s comments,” Desmond posted on the social media platform X. “No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”
On a local Fox affiliate in San Diego, one news anchor announced grimly that Trump had called for “a foreign adversary to attack America,” which was “something an American president has never, ever done or said.”
Not until Tuesday did the White House move aggressively to put out the fire the president had started. Communications director Steven Cheung wrote on X: “The media freak-out over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”
Cheung was backed up by subsequent nonpartisan analysis. “While his wording is confusing, a more plausible interpretation is that he meant the war would prevent Iran from posing a threat to U.S. cities, and higher gas prices are a small sacrifice to make. He’s made versions of those points before, using similar language,” FactCheck.org wrote.
But the damage that Trump himself had inflicted with the speaking style he so often touts had already been done. In today’s world, an old saying often misattributed to Mark Twain might be rewritten this way: “Misinformation can travel halfway around the world while the fact-checkers are putting on their shoes.”
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